11. I got nothin.

49. That's too easy.

A terrorists is anyone that challenges the authoritarian state. E.g., Occupy.

The authoritarian state gets to decide who is a terrorist and what the punishment is.

And I am guessing you are joking about the public scrutiny.

Of course in the name of democracy, the public gets to vote on who gets to be the authoritarian figurehead leader.

The tough question is who is behind the figurehead? Who is included in the cabal running our government. Who is forcing our figurehead president to appoint the same economic leaders that Bush had and the same guys Bush had as security leaders?

80. Well said! What many don't seem to get is this is relative to TPTB at

the time. Individuals might be great under one regime and declared evil under the next. It is ALL relative to whom TPTB are at a point in time. And, these same tools will be used by that particular regime. When I was kid it was the communists are coming, the Russians are gonna get us ... now, it's the terrorists are gonna get us. Same old, same old. It's also the cloak and dagger secrecy.

And predictive analysis ... individuals declared a threat because they are interested in more than vogue inane dribble. ... those questioning our direction as a country declared a threat to TPTB ... possibly. Imagine what could be built as a profile from DU postings alone, for example. All of this starts to remind me of the KGB.

J Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarty would have loved tools like this. I often think many Americans are woefully forgetting history when countries proceed down this path.

20. !

68. This ones on my list, Manny~

Boston Rock's................Sorry you were not able to make it to this post about Boston. Being a Watertown
Native resident thought you might belatedly want to kick it. I know you love Boston.

Boston got blown away, so to speak on April 15th. Our patriots day, our Marathon. They were blown into the mist.

Sad because they were not the bad ones they were the good ones. Three souls died! Sixteen people lost limbs.

I still cry~

Remember shelter in place, yea me too. LOL we were called sheeple...we were mindless bots. The police cowered us. We were called that everywhere. We were called that on DU. They droned away over and over about how stupid we were.Mindless.

16. If it's so secret, how do you know about it?

Should I be looking for drones under my bed? I know I have dust bunnies under there, so it wouldn't surprise me.

And the big power line in my front yard has a helicopter fly down it twice a month, which is a rare thing here in the national forest unless you're growing pot, or you live next to a big assed power line. Frankly, the power company could save a lot of money by ditching that copter and using a unmanned drone. The insurance costs alone would likely save a bundle, let alone the fuel. Alas, that's the price we pay for reliable electric service out here in the bush. At least I am an owner. It's a CO-OP electric company. And I don't mind the twice monthly overflights as long as the damned 220KVolt lines stay up on the towers and not in my yard. Maybe I ought to suggest that they enlist some high school students building them a drone to do the same as their twice monthly copter. Might be a good savings on everybody's bill.

24. I think that I shouldn't admit this, but

27. Ah. Bimbo alerts were media rapid responses

to Bimbo eruptions in the Clinton era, a couple of the more famous eruptees being Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers. So bimbo alerts made you want to turn of the TV and listen to music instead of NPR for a week or two.

77. +1

54. And what the OP is suggesting in aTongue and Cheek

Is that the connections between these two is at the very least troubling.

Care to look into those history books and how kill lists and state surveillance were connected....have been connected?

"Those who don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it" or words to that effect from Santayana apply here.

Hey, at least one of those regimes, and trust me, it wasn't just one, burned books. These days we don't have to worry...willful ignorance makes burning books not necessary.

And before you scream nazi, I said one of many. You think only the Nazis did that? The soviets, Pinochet Chile, Argentina, Spain, the Killing fields, the Great Leap Forward, central America in the 1980s...and those are just the tip of that...

I know I know, it's legal (a disgusting talking point on it's own) and this could never happen here....

71. How I learned to stop worrying and love the totalitarianism,

in 3 easy steps:

1- The first step is to admit that leftist pundits so reliable we can set our watches by them if we still wore watches are as full of baloney as Rush, Billo and Glenn. Glenn B that is.

2 - The next step is to realize that the only way to know what's actually going on after reading or hearing the news is to come here and check ProSense's threads. Well there are other ways I suppose but that's a good short cut.

3 - The last step is to figure out how to stop worrying and love DU without getting pissed off by certain other prominent threads and that one I'm still working on but I think we're all making progress so life is good.

Becomes the accepted norm and after a decade or so a true totalitarian becomes chief executive. Then we'll pine for the days when it was just complaints about water quality that could land you on a list.

If there is even a shred of the idealism within Obama that drew us to him then he has to be the one to end this madness. If he won't do it on his own then we must demand it be done because it is only a matter of time until a true authoritarian gets into office. The longer we tolerate this the longer it has a chance to insulate itself.

88. Total brain fart on my part

59. This is a problem. Perhaps the biggest threat to the US since confederation.

It's "bipartisan", it's promoted by the most powerful in both parties.
It can't be fixed with a *cough* debate, or a few crumbs thrown to appease. It's wrong, criminally wrong, and very very deeply rooted.

62. Read "The Way of the Knife". You have no idea.

"A Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter’s riveting account of the transformation of the CIA and America’s special operations forces into man-hunting and killing machines in the world’s dark spaces: the new American way of war

The most momentous change in American warfare over the past decade has taken place away from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, in the corners of the world where large armies can’t go. The Way of the Knife is the untold story of that shadow war: a campaign that has blurred the lines between soldiers and spies and lowered the bar for waging war across the globe. America has pursued its enemies with killer drones and special operations troops; trained privateers for assassination missions and used them to set up clandestine spying networks; and relied on mercurial dictators, untrustworthy foreign intelligence services, and proxy armies.

This new approach to war has been embraced by Washington as a lower risk, lower cost alternative to the messy wars of occupation and has been championed as a clean and surgical way of conflict. But the knife has created enemies just as it has killed them. It has fomented resentments among allies, fueled instability, and created new weapons unbound by the normal rules of accountability during wartime."

78. Not anymore

Cosa Nostra (Mafia) is on a down swing.

Ndrengheta in Italy is more good old boy by Italian standards. And it literally comes out of the Southern Mountain Regions there. IE No hair gel. That will get a man's ass whooped in my husband's home town in Calabria.

72. HOPE you aren't on the "list" and CHANGE your phone number often. nt

73. Manny, please correct me if I am wrong here~

You said

So the White House definitely has a secret kill list.

And is likely secretly recording every phone conversation and email we send.

Both are unprecedented in the US, certainly in peacetime.

Are we not still at war? In Afghanistan? Recently ended the war in Iraq? We are both talking about Bushcos war? The one that was paid for on a credit card. There infinity limit wrought havoc on our economy. They crashed it. Everyone runs around and says the bankers killed us. Well sorry the Bush administration caused this havoc!

Both are unprecedented in the US, certainly in peacetime.

We are at Peace while we are still at war!??!How can that be?
And if you will, please post the link to the secret kill lists~ Thanks!

87. You're right, and I'm doubly wrong

We are kinda at war, so you're right about that.

What I specifically had in mind was the censoring of letters between military and family during WWII. Obama's programs are infinitely more invasive than the WWII program. So I'll update the OP to simply state "unprecedented", rather than have the wartime qualifier.